Its good to know that civil servants are as careless with their own possessions as they are with the personal data they hold on the nation.
The Liberal Democrats have today published statistics showing that Home Office employees have lost 3,492 security passes since 2001 - more than one a day.
The Home Office and Ministry of Justice (which split in 2007) had around 100,000 employees between them last year.
Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, has seized on the figures as evidence of why identity cards should be scrapped.
"Everyone understands that things can go missing, but these figures suggest a culture of carelessness among the people responsible for our safety and security. On average, one of their employees loses their security pass every day," he says.
Unfortunately, the Lib Dems have not published figures for HM Revenue and Customs - the department responsible for losing the child benefit records of 25 million people, or the Ministry of Defence, where a computer hard drive containing details of 100,000 service personnel and 600,000 applicants went awol, or indeed the government contractor that mislaid the personal details of 5,000 justice staff, or for that matter, a sorting centre in Coventry where the names and addresses of 7,685 Northern Ireland motorists were lost - but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
